Back to the Past: BR was British, but was it Great?

The railway needs a 'guiding mind'. Across the industry we can hear not just a penny, but a cascade of coinage dropping as if from an out-of-control slot machine. I started my career with rolling stock, in the last days of BR, with very little exposure to the rest of the railway. We (BREL) were soon privatised and globalised away from the rest of the system. Even so I can remember our universal bemusement at the privatisation proposals as they emerged in the early 1990s. How would the railway run without somebody or something in overall charge?

It wasn't that we were particularly (or at all) ideological, or even especially attached to BR. There was a sense of being part of a big family, even if it was a dysfunctional one. Of course, there were our Priv cards and (of no concern to me at the time, though of great interest to others) railway pensions, and a sense of belonging. But offsetting that there was a great deal of frustration, even anger, at the petty penny-pinching (I was once sent to get written authorisation from a boss to send a letter first class) and at least amongst us younger people a sense that our sprawling paternalistic but often uncaring employer was of the past, not the future. On my first day at work I had to join the TSSA union - BR was a closed shop - and was presented with its handbook adorned with a cartoon of the stereotypical buxom blonde secretary sitting on the desk of a smug male boss. Jimmy Saville (before his scandals but long after he felt modern) fronted its adverts. Crewe works had a foundry. BR in the 1980s was of its time, and for everything it did well, it did many things badly. It was doing no more than presiding over the gracious long-term decline of an industry written off by politicians, the media and most importantly customers.

What nobody could understand at the time was how the railway was to avoid becoming 'a maze of agreements between hundreds of different parties, drawn up and policed by battalions of lawyers and consultants', in the words of the hardly prescient Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail a quarter-century later. Welcome as the plan is, reading it is a frustration - the drawbacks of fragmenting the fragile system that is any railway was as obvious at the time as it has been ever since. It is truly a tribute to railway managers, engineers and staff that over the years, despite the externally imposed disaggregation, Britain's railways have continued to improve, get safer, and attract more custom than ever, at least before the pandemic struck.

Williams-Shapps also, rightly, makes much of the fragmentation of the current railways and imagines this will now disappear. It needs to be remembered, however, that BR was pretty siloed, with strong quasi-independent regions and not much discussion between disciplines and functions (at least as I recall). It may be that GBR manages somehow to reconcile centralisation and devolution, and get the best of both. They are inevitable aspects of running a national railway system, and all issues have national and local components. BR often managed itself in insular local fiefdoms lorded-over by a distant, crushing bureaucracy.

Nearly everyone I know in the industry is positive about the plan's proposed combination of a proper national rail authority, a 'guiding mind', a reborn SRA-with-attitude, with a continuation of the local accountability arising from independent regional transport authorities, train operating companies and devolved routes/regions. If there is a concern, it is voiced eloquently and accurately by Williams-Shapps, who observe (p32, web edition) that:

British Rail was dependent on public funding, for which there were many competing claims. It was often denied medium and long-term financial certainty, meaning that it had to operate year-to-year and could not plan properly or deliver efficiently. Short-term pressures to save relatively small sums forced British Rail into damaging decisions that were not in its or the country's long-term interest, and that later had to be reversed at far greater cost

We can only hope that Great British Railways will be able to make the case for electrification over energy-intensive (and expensive) hydrogen experiments, not succumb to the temptation to take maintenance and renewals holidays, and have the courage to entrust their expensive, professional staff with prudently choosing between first and second class stamps, or the modern equivalent, when spending a penny of 'public money'.

So what was British Rail really like? Last week one of my Crossrail colleagues observed (in a room of ten people) that I was rare in being able to remember England in a big final, ignoring my miniscule age at the time not to mention the indifference to 1966 and all that, then as now, in Edinburgh. That made me realise to my horror that I was probably also rare in remembering what it was like to work for BR and to use it.

I only saw BR in its dog days, but a lockdown-driven project has given me a fascinating refresher course in what it was like. I've never been an 'enthusiast' in the classic sense, collecting train numbers say, although my interest in railways is life-long. Having been born and bred within earshot of the ECML at Craigentinny in east Edinburgh I realised at about age 17 that a part of railway history was about to end and I resolved to capture it. Since birth, big, bold, smoky, noisy, prestige locos, with a tangible sense of presence and evocative names, had been part of the landscape, visible from my school, audible in my bedroom and everywhere else, hauling crack express trains to the promised land, gold-paved streets and bright lights of London. Not 'Flying Scotsman' or 'Mallard', but 'Meld' and 'Royal Scots Grey': the Deltics.

I taught myself photography, built a cubby-hole darkroom, bunked off school, disappeared from grey Edinburgh for weeks on end, and somehow amassed 10,000 B&W negatives of them. These negs were never pristine (those of you old enough to have done B&W photography will know all about dust and scratches) and 40 years of lying in attics hasn't helped. So over the last few months I have spent countless hours with Photoshop, tins of Stella, my vape, and Radio 6, staring at British Rail circa 1980. What did I see?

Stations were dingier and darker than they are now, as were the people (including me). Railway staff were invariably male, white, and of a certain age. Locomotives were everywhere, and they all, even the Deltics, bore the same livery. There were the odd old DMUs and, down south, EMUs. But, in essence, a train consisted of an early-60s diesel loco and a motley assortment of Mk I or II coaches. These were all, of course, modernisation era vehicles, but to us then that was ancient history. An air-conditioned Mk IId still looked sort of modern, a contrast to the Mk I catering and parcels vehicles ever-present in all consists, but the shiny HSTs (boo!) were remarkable simply because they were new. Nothing else was.

Steam heating was still in widespread use and steamy wisps are seen everywhere, pouring from locos, couplers and station shore supplies. Fuel efficiency wasn't a thing, then. There are motorail trains, travelling post-offices, oil-lit tail-lamps, parcels, BRUTEs, semaphore signals and various bits of pre-war rolling stock used for storing bits and pieces, all gone from the mainline. Class 08 shunters and the ubiquitous Class 47 were omnipresent and some are still around, no longer though in the uniform colours of the day. Nearly every shot has the BR double-arrow, soon to reinsert itself into our railway subconscious, though, like Class 47 locos, it never really went away.

As for the Deltics themselves, they were an extraordinary piece of railway engineering, the 22 of them replacing 55 steam locos and allowing the acceleration of ECML services (and thus their survival in the face of the onslaught of dual carriageways). Intended as a stop-gap before electrification, their success may have postponed it further decades, and they ensured there was still an ECML inter-city service worth modernising with HSTs. They were 30% more powerful, and 10% lighter, than the interesting but sluggish 'Westerns' or conventional Class 47s or 50s which were their nearest diesel rivals. Their traction characteristics were closer to those of electric locos such as Class 86, without the need for unaffordable wires. Over time, because of the very high mileages they ran up, their unit maintenance costs were comparable to lesser locos. Their amazing two-stroke, opposed piston, triangular engines demonstrated conclusively that BR could, and did, innovate. The project was also an early public-private partnership: English Electric produced a prototype at its expense, and maintained the engines on a guaranteed mileage basis. Above all, the Deltics were the right, bold, economic and engineering solution to a very real railway problem.

What, if anything, can GBR learn from its dowdy, unmourned predecessor? Firstly, perhaps, that BR did not become dowdy until its final years, and its dowdiness reflected the country as a whole. During BR's entire stewardship of the national railway system usage was in secular decline due to the rise of cars, lorries and (to a limited extent towards the end) domestic aviation. BR faced hostility and inflexibility from most of its stakeholders, and in the words of Williams-Shapps was constantly forced into damaging decisions to save small sums of money. Despite that it survived, transitioning from steam to diesel, and in some places electric, surviving Beeching and Serpell, and preserving the amazing Victorian main-line railway infrastructure more or less intact for modern generations to use, enjoy and expand.

Now, as then, though, the railways are in a fight for survival. BR was born of the cataclysm of WWII, but for the railway if not the country as a whole the pandemic has been equally cataclysmic and it cannot survive without either continued government support or a return to more normal traffic levels. It will need to be as guileful and innovative as BR, when under pressure, was, while retaining the support of the government, railway staff, and above all customers which BR latterly had lost. It will need to be frugal like BR, but without the self-defeating penny-pinching approach which usually, per Williams-Shapps, led to huge waste and damage. The media need to brought back on side somehow. Simpler fares, more parcels and logistics, listening to customers and giving them what they want, even well-sprung seats like on a Mk I coach. Young people often don't drive: many like railways, and would like them more if they were simpler and cheaper, more fun. Our rolling stock and stations have been modernised, there is much more electrification, railway staff are usually friendly and approachable, and the ideological hostility to railways has gone. Perhaps characterful diesel locos with triangular engines and evocative names are too much to ask for. Back to the future!

[If anyone's interested, some of the restored Deltic photos can be found here. In the course of the project I learnt how to scan and repair old negatives digitally, and if anyone is interested send me a message and I'll share my process with you].